


things that just were

by salienne



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-06
Updated: 2009-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:10:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salienne/pseuds/salienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scooti Manista is dead and the drills have stopped drilling. Before anyone goes anywhere, Rose has a moment to think, and she and the Doctor have a moment to talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	things that just were

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Time in Flux ficathon at [](http://doctor-rose-fic.livejournal.com/profile)[**doctor_rose_fic**](http://doctor-rose-fic.livejournal.com/).
> 
> Spoilers for The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit

Rose sat with her legs drawn up, her back pressed against a gray metal wall. The cold seeped in past her jacket. She watched her hands on her knees, fingers twisting together, as she failed tremendously at not thinking.

The door to the hallway was not exactly quiet as it slid open; _Open Door 28_ , a female voice announced, and then metal hissed against metal. Rose looked over to see the Doctor walking forward, eyes momentarily downcast as he stepped over the scuffed yellow doorframe. When he looked up she smiled wide. “Hey,” she said.

Just as quietly, he responded, “Hi.”

The Doctor’s footsteps were nearly silent, hands hidden in his trouser pockets, as he walked over. He sat down beside her with his legs stretched out.

Eyes focused on her knees, Rose said, “I was just thinking, do you remember the last time we visited my mum?”

The Doctor turned to look at her.

“She was actually expecting us that time. God, she even made roast chicken.” Looking over at the Doctor, she couldn’t help but grin. “You _hated_ the crumble.”

“Oi. 'Hate’ is a very strong word,” he protested. “All right, granted, I may have had a somewhat mutually borderline antagonistic relationship with that crumble—and scorching, well scorched, scorched on its end, mind you—but there was no hatred of any sort. At least not from me.”

Rose raised her eyebrows. With a small huff, the Doctor leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms. “That’s my story, and my twenty thousand taste buds and I are sticking to it.”

“Okay,” Rose said, “so it was the crumble doing the talking for you when you stood up-”

“-I said thank you-”

“-when you stood up and told Mum you had to get back to the TARDIS to fix the time bumper thingamajigy, and did she have some water ‘cause your tongue was partial to, how did you put it…” She put a finger to her chin. “Oh yeah, ‘desserts of a less desert-like nature’?”

“Well it’s true,” he said. “I happen to have a very sensitive tongue. _And_ the time bumper thingamajigy hadn’t been calibrated in years.”

The Doctor’s face was the very picture of righteous indignation, eyebrows slightly raised and his mouth a horizontal line. Rose waited, an arm slung over her knees, until the Doctor’s face broke out into a crooked smile. “Still hasn’t been, actually,” he admitted.

Mindless giggling, Rose realized, was exactly what she needed right now, and for just a few seconds she allowed that laughter to overwhelm her. The noise was sharp, clattering past the somber rush of galaxies dying beyond the thin metal shell around them, and she pressed a hand against her mouth to soften it. The Doctor’s chest shook as he, too, chuckled.

Breathing deeply, Rose snuggled into his side. She felt the brush of his fingers across her hair, a brief caress, and her eyes flickered shut.

“Anyway,” she said, voice still thick with humor, “I was thinking about that night, when me and Shareen went to the pub. Don’t think I ever told you but two of Mickey’s mates were there. They said they hadn’t seen him in months, nor me either. Reckoned we’d run off together.” She smiled slightly, thinking back to what they once had, to what had faded. To Mickey.

And somehow that was what made the lump rise in her throat. That was what made it a struggle to keep going.

“I couldn’t tell ‘em, Doctor,” she whispered, “not the truth, not anything. I froze up. I told ‘em I didn’t know, that I’d heard he’d maybe found a job somewhere or something and-God, I made him sound like a complete waste of space.”

And without planning it, without even knowing it was coming or that the experience at the pub meant anything more than one sad night, her eyes stung and the blue of her jeans blurred with the skin of her hands. The Doctor’s shoulder shifted and his arm slipped around her. It tightened and Rose forced herself to take a long breath. She wrapped her own arms across her stomach and closed her eyes. She tried very hard not to see Scooti’s lifeless face looking back at her from the blackness.

Quietly, the Doctor said, “We both know Mickey’s so much more than that, Rose. An entire universe knows that.”

Rose nodded slightly, picturing Mickey sleeping peacefully in a bedroom down the hall from his gran until dawn came; then his grandmother was beating on the door with her cane, and Mickey jerked awake. Soon after she would insist on making breakfast and he’d insist on doing most of the work, and then he’d go out and battle the remaining Cybermen. Her father—no, Pete, another Pete—would also be there, and then she made herself think of Mickey and only Mickey. About how he would save lives and come home at night to a grandmother was finally _finally_ proud of him.

Every night, and much of the day, she would know where he was.

“Yeah,” Rose said. “Suppose they do.”

She thought about her own mum then, doing the washing down at the launderette or fixing others’ hair at the flat. Rose thought about her mother going through the motions of her life and always waiting, never knowing what had happened to her daughter. Rose pulled her knees closer to her torso. Her mother would know even less than Scooti’s family and, God, she didn’t like thinking about this. She _hated_ thinking about this. But she didn’t think her mum would ever stop wondering why Rose still hadn’t come home.

Rose could hear the Doctor’s breathing; her head rose and fell slightly with the constriction and relaxation of his diaphragm. Through the fabric of her jacket, she could feel his hand stroking her upper arm.

With the Doctor she was safe—surely her mother knew that. Even if she didn’t like him very much, her mum had to know that as long as Rose was with him, she would be fine, even when those around her were not.

“That hull breach wasn’t an accident, was it?” Rose said.

The Doctor sighed. “I hate saying this, but I honestly don’t know.”

“Thought you said ‘hate’ was a ‘very strong word.’"

“In this case, I think it applies.”

Rose smiled. “D’you think it was that Beast thing? Maybe an Ood?”

“Could be. Beast or not, something’s affecting those Ood and given enough psychic power, you could make a telepathically-based slave race do, well, anything.” He let out a breath and Rose remained silent as he stretched out his shoulder, then relaxed it again. Her own neck was starting to ache, but she didn’t want to move just yet. “At the same time, though,” the Doctor continued, “that quake was _rough_ and, from the sound of it, not anything out of the ordinary. This base is falling apart and, take it from me, Rose, space bases do not do very well when you start breaking chunks off.”

Picturing this base, Rose found herself thinking of child’s blocks laid side-to-side, and then what happened when the school bully walked up and kicked half of them away. She remembered standing there at that window and, instead of a small room holding the TARDIS, seeing a gaping chasm of gray rock.

“They’re not gonna be able to stay here much longer, are they?” she asked.

“Everything has its time, Rose,” the Doctor said. “Even half-mad expeditions to an impossible planet floating at the edge of a black hole.”

Sitting up, Rose twisted her body around to face him. His arm slipped to her lower back. “Do you think we’ll find it?” she asked. “The TARDIS? Before they’ve gotta leave, I mean.”

“Yes, I do.” The Doctor’s voice was firm. “I will.”

Rose pulled away from him completely. “I’m coming with you,” she said.

“No, Rose, you’re not.”

“Doctor, you said it yourself: the Ood could be dangerous. If you’re trying to protect me-”

“I’m not trying to protect you.”

“Then what?”

The Doctor’s gaze was hard and steady, though not anything Rose hadn’t seen before and not anything she would look away from. He stood, and so did she.

The Doctor said, “We need to find out what’s going on here, Rose. To do that, one of us needs to keep an eye on things up here. Watch the Ood, talk to the crew, keep things calm in case anything happens. The rate this crew’s losing members, they could use some help.”

Rose did not so much as glance away.

More quietly this time, the Doctor continued, “Rose, the TARDIS is down at the core of this planet and I can sense her. You can’t.”

Hands on her hips, Rose found it tempting simply to ask, “So?” No matter what they did, whether they were together or apart, someone was always in danger. Someone always—well, someone always lost something precious. At least this way, she and the Doctor would be together even if everything went to hell.

Besides, it wasn’t even like she needed his permission. She could put on a space suit and take the lift down no matter what the Doctor said, and Zach wouldn’t complain for long.

Of course then Zach would be left behind up here, along with Danny and Toby and Mr. Jefferson and a whole lot of Ood. Obviously they could handle themselves—they would be very poor deep-space explorers otherwise—but after everything she and the Doctor had been through, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to think that she could help up here. Underground, she would just be a twenty-year-old girl who had never been in a space suit before; even though the Doctor did not say it, didn’t even imply it, she would be a liability.

And now, if she really listened, she knew he was saying that he needed her to stay behind.

Rose pressed the backs of her fingers against her mouth. Breathing deeply, she forced herself to keep it together. When she turned back to him, her voice was quiet as she said, “But it’s still dangerous down there.”

The Doctor remained silent, and it was answer enough.

Could a Time Lord survive without oxygen, Rose wanted to ask. What would happen if suit malfunctioned? What would happen if his helmet broke?

She felt sick for even thinking it.

Tentatively, Rose reached out and placed her hand on the side of the Doctor’s face. Beneath her palm she felt the cool skin above his cheekbone, beneath her fingers one of his rough sideburns and hair stiff with product the Doctor would never admit to using. She stroked the skin beside his left eye with her thumb, feeling the faint bristle of an eyebrow.

“Doctor,” she murmured, unsure if that was even what she wanted to say or if there was anything more to say.

The Doctor was breathing slowly through parted lips. He would be going underground without her soon into a lightless airless cavern, and although each of them had gone off alone into an unknown danger before, this time felt different. This time they were stuck on an impossible planet at the edge of a black hole with no TARDIS, no cell phone reception, and no idea of what enemy they were facing.

This time, she didn’t see a long hug and a bumpy console room at the end of their adventure.

Rose leaned forward and, just as she began to feel his breath against her lips, the Doctor inclined his head.

She kissed him.

The Doctor’s lips were cool and soft against hers, a steady pressure that shifted when she moved, then shifted of their own accord. Rose actually stilled then, surprised he wasn’t pushing her away or standing there like a shop window dummy; and then she stopped caring and wound her arms around his neck. As best she could, Rose allowed herself to get lost in the sensation of his lips moving against hers and the whisper of his teeth, his tongue, and everything they never said.

The Doctor’s hands were on her sides, and then she felt him pull her closer, one arm slipping across her back as the movement against her lips intensified. His other hand moved to her neck, thumb brushing lightly against her throat.

Just for a moment, Rose felt herself drawn even closer until they were pressed together, chest to chest. His fingers caressed her cheek.

She gasped, mouth opening.

Rose’s lips chased after the Doctor’s when he pulled back. He left his forehead resting against hers, both of them breathing too quickly, Rose’s thoughts whirling.

Then even the hand on her side fell away.

Stepping back, Rose allowed her hands to slip away from his neck. She straightened her jacket, composing herself. The Doctor was looking at her tenderly, with a strange sort of determination, and she rolled back her shoulders and smiled. She said, “Thought I’d show you what you’d be missing, if you didn’t come back.”

“I’m coming back, Rose,” the Doctor told her. He said the words calmly, a fact like “It’s raining outside” or “It also travels in time.” Things that just were.

As she smoothed a hand over the Doctor’s suit jacket, Rose simply said, “Good.”


End file.
